FLEP: Enabling Flexible and Efficient Preemption on GPUs

GPUs are widely adopted in HPC and cloud computing platforms to accelerate general-purpose workloads. However, modern GPUs do not support flexible preemption, leading to performance and priority inversion problems in multi-tasking environments.

In this paper, we propose and develop FLEP, the first software system that enables flexible kernel preemption and kernel scheduling on commodity GPUs. The FLEP compilation engine transforms the GPU program into preemptable forms, which can be interrupted during execution and yield all or part of the streaming multi-processors (SMs) in the GPU. The FLEP runtime engine intercepts all kernel invocations and determines which kernels and how those kernels should be preempted and scheduled. Experimental results on two-kernel co-runs demonstrate up to 24.2X speedup for high-priority kernels and up to 27X improvement on normalized average turnaround time for kernels with the same priority. FLEP reduces the preemption latency by up to 41% compared to yielding the whole GPU when the waiting kernels only need several SMs. With all the benefits, FLEP only introduces 2.5% runtime overhead, which is substantially lower than the kernel slicing approach.